The Serpent

by Neil M. Gunn

  She moved on a step or two and paused again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered, her emotion threatening her again.

  His sympathy for her, the kindness in his heart towards her, was such that she must have felt it. It obviously irked her terribly, but she could not leave him.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘I wish you would tell me.’

  ‘Do you know Alastair Chisholm?’

  ‘I know his father, James Chisholm, the wood merchant, better. My father did business with him.’ Then he added, ‘Don’t be afraid to tell me anything. If I can help you, I will.’

  He did not look at her face, making it easy for her, because it was clear that he had stumbled on her secret trouble and this knowledge was now between them.

  ‘Alastair told me Donald might not be going home,’ she said ‘– he might be going to Canada.’ She looked at him, searching for his denial.

  But Tom nodded slowly. ‘I – see,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t believe it, do you?’

  He looked at her. ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered.

  He saw her lips press in between her teeth, saw the quiver go over her body. She turned from him and walked on.

  He stood where he was, looking after her. Before leaving the green meadow, she paused and looked back, then drifted across the thoroughfare. He watched her until she had gone from his sight.

  Through Toll Cross and down Lothian Road he went until he came to the West End. Almost unconsciously he was heading for Leith and the sea. But as he walked along the garden side of Princes Street, a cavernous train whistle drew him up, its sound indescribably forlorn down there in the black shadow of the rock. His eyes lifted to the outline of the castle and so clearly was it silhouetted against the sky that somewhere the moon must have risen. He saw the outline through the tall iron railings, and for a moment had the shudder of a mediaeval prisoner looking on an eternal fortress.

  Through the cab rank and across the wide street he picked his way until he came amid the lights and the sauntering throng. There was a slight touch of frost in the air and the wide pavement seemed gay with distinguished faces over tall, fashionably-clothed bodies. Drifting like a waif, his loneliness came about him. Opposite the Mound, he stopped.

  In this sea of life he was lost; forever in the tides of life he was lost. He turned up to his left, and as he passed a corner of Rose Street a woman invited him from the shadows.

  He looked at her and she approached, but he kept walking on and as she drew by his side, he turned his face. ‘Nothing doing tonight,’ he said in so natural a voice that she stopped as if a brother had spoken, and with a small upward nod of understanding fell back.

  When he got on to the ridge of George Street, he saw the rising moon, nearly at the full. It held him arrested for a long time, and slowly from it, against his will, there trickled into his mind the memory that it was round about the full moon that Janet’s mother had usually had one of her bouts. For an instant the memory was a country superstition remote from him in time and place, a necromancy of the past – that advanced and closed upon his mind like a fist. He shook his head and staggered where he stood.

  The geography of the world settled about him in vast oceans and continents. Canada – if going to Canada, Donald would have taken train to Glasgow. Tom stared at the moon, at the gleam on its face, the serene unearthly pale gold gleam of the moon-woman.

  Turning, he made back for Princes Street and the railway station. He would take the first train for Glasgow.

  So weird a night he spent in Glasgow that it had for him long afterwards the quality of one of those dreams in which, amid new scenes and new faces, one hunts and never finds.

  His impatience to discover whether a ship was leaving or had left for Canada drew him to the docks. All offices, of course, were closed, but he learned in time that a steamer had left the previous day from the Tail of the Bank, passengers having gone to Greenock to join her. He had no desire to see Dougal Robertson or any of the lads he had known so well, and with a strange outlandish feeling stuck by the half-drunken company he had landed amongst. He was accepted as a country lad, the inevitable Highlander, anxious to flee the poverty of his native heath. His knowledge of socialism and agnosticism soon drew him into argument. He was utterly without care now, without vanity, without hope. Nothing could offend him, and the thick warm oaths came upon his ears like echoes from some ancient inferno. With what complete liberation hell lets loose the desperations in man’s mind! He had some shillings in his trousers pocket, and he offered the money for drink. Though all the pubs were closed, no difficulty was experienced in buying whisky.

  The raw spirit went fierily to his head for he had eaten little that day and he spent the night in the room where the liquor was drunk. A tow-haired strident-voiced girl had made a pet of him and taken his head on her knees. The drink had had the effect of letting him see through surface talk and gesture to what appeared to be the essential human nature of his companions, and for a time he was conscious of an almost fantastic feeling of human understanding and liberation. At one point there was a fight and a lean cantankerous man was thrown out, and the meaning behind that fight partook of the nature of revelation.

  Under a growing feeling of illness the scene became blurred and the girl bent her head over him.

  In the morning his instinct was to slink away, but the same girl gave him some scalding hot tea. What was he going to do now? ‘I’ll have a hunt around,’ he answered, hardly looking at her or at dim corners of the ill-lit dingy room. There was a strained pain in his eyes and his head was throbbing. But as he left he turned, and with Highland manners, thanked her for her hospitality. She was going to have laughed, but didn’t. Her loose mouth came adrift in a jeering expression that her eyes belied. He was glad to get away.

  His belt was still round his waist under his shirt, for he had never lost the countryman’s fear of being robbed in the city. In a latrine he opened the small leather pocket in the green canvas of the belt. It had held three pound notes. It now contained one.

  Even a surge of anger was enough to bring out cold sweat, but as he stared through his dismay, a dry smile wrinkled his features. Why hadn’t she taken them all?

  He could not have accused her or anyone – even if he were mad enough to dare accuse them.

  Why had she left him one?

  In a sudden flurry his fingers dived into a top waistcoat pocket. The return half of his ticket from Glasgow was still there. He breathed heavily with relief.

  He started for Greenock and on the train thought that if he had gone to the head office of the steamship company in Glasgow he might have been saved the trip. If Donald had booked as a passenger, his name was bound to be on a passenger list. He could present himself as one who had arrived from the far north with something which Donald had left behind, and so would be glad to know if he, Mr. Donald Munro, had been in time and had actually sailed. He felt, however, that Donald, who could not have the money for the passage, must have signed on as an ordinary seaman or steward. He had probably been trying to arrange this for the last month. If not in the steamship office, then in some Custom House or Board of Trade office his name was bound to be among the names of the crew.

  Something which Donald had left behind!

  That night, in a sudden revulsion of feeling against the city, he retrieved his small bag from the left-luggage office and caught the train for the north.

  He had got shaved for the first time in his life by a professional barber. His face felt thin almost to vanishing point. His body was so exhausted that it, too, had attained a light incorporeal feeling. Donald’s departure for Canada as a steerage passenger induced a sense of finality. There was nothing more he could do. It was a relief to be free of the murderous burden of what he had intended to do; sheer relief, and he cared no more.

  He lay slumped in his corner with his eyes closed. In this attitude he could let time pass for ever. Vaguely he dreamed, though he knew he was not asleep. But
the drifting figures in his dream had no power over his emotions. Nothing came to a point of feeling. Somewhere in the Perthshire highlands the carriage lurched and his eyes opened. Through the window he saw the moon, full in the sky. He gazed at it for a long time with some of its own detachment. Slowly an austere quality in its serenity touched him with a shiver of cold. The bare outlines of the near hills, their dumb shoulders, their endurance, their darkness under the living gold of the moon, affected his body to a slow writhing. His lips moved and his head fell back.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He got home on Saturday night. The absence from his mother had somehow estranged her in his mind, and as he approached the house he had all he could do to force himself to enter. But he spoke to her in a friendly even way, and soon he began to feel the security of his home about him. He answered that he had found everyone and everything pretty much as they used to be. ‘Any news?’ he asked casually.

  ‘No, nothing very special. Indeed no-one has been here since you left. I was down at the shop this morning with the eggs. There’s not much price for them now. And that’s all I have been out. Did you enjoy your journey?’

  ‘Yes, fine. It was a change.’

  ‘I thought you would be staying for a few more days when you were at it.’

  ‘Well, I thought of it – but ach I got tired of the city. It’s all right if you’re living there.’

  She was very busy with the table, making excuses for not having proper food ready, obviously pleased that he had grown tired of the city. He could not but feel her pleasure in having him back. Perhaps she had thought he might never come back!

  That night, however, he slept badly, and it angered him for he knew how desperately his hot body needed sleep.

  Breakfast over and the soup pot on the fire, his mother began to dress for church. When she had gone, instead of the relief he had expected to find in the empty house, he was pursued by an extra virulent restlessness.

  When his mother returned, she was subdued. At table she said, ‘Donald the minister’s son was not in his place today. He has not come home.’

  ‘Oh. Why?’

  ‘I met Mrs. Maclean on the way to church. She was telling me that Mrs. Grant told her and she got it from Williamina that Donald wrote his father saying that he found the church was not for him, he could not go on with his studies. So he left and has gone to Canada.’

  ‘To Canada.’

  ‘Yes. Poor man, it’s been a terrible blow to him. If only Donald had come home and told him; anything but going away like that. His voice was wrung today. You could see sorrow on him.’

  Clearly his mother had much more on her mind, so as soon as the meal was over he went out.

  There would be the new startled whisper that perhaps, after all, there was more in Donald’s disappearance than his having found he had no vocation for the church. Though how unwillingly they would shift suspicion from the serpent-atheist who had killed his own father to the son of the minister of the gospel!

  Tom might have enjoyed the bitterness of this, were it not for the implication of fatherhood, which he had hitherto kept from really entering his mind. The irony of it in his case was so annihilating that it could not be allowed to enter. It was hardly the sort of thing to brood upon!

  That afternoon, when some of the old spasms of violence began to possess him again, he took to the hills.

  Damnation! was there to be no peace for him for ever? He would have wept in his rage had there been tears left in his dry hot eyes.

  The hills had only loneliness for him, not peace. Nothing had been solved. He was going to have made Donald marry Janet under threat of death. Donald would have understood him. For there would have been no escape for Donald. If Donald made a false promise to gain time, Tom would pursue him. Tom would pursue him, if need be, over the earth, once the position had been made clear and final between them. There would be no let-up after that. It had taken a week for him to achieve this certainty of death in himself. But he had done it. He would not emotionally threaten Donald. Calmly, clearly, he would show Donald his duty. This calmness would penetrate all vanities and evasions, until Donald would perceive that in Tom was death. There had been days when Tom had known a strange peace, when the killer, death, had walked with him as a quiet companion.

  But Donald was gone and no word had been spoken between them. Peace was broken. The hours and the hours ahead would press in on him, ever more heavy with what could not be avoided.

  He came back through the dusk and the bird-singing, looked at the corner of the field where his father had stood, saw the near dead ground and the outlines of the low hills far away, and, as once before, there was a blueness on the hills, but now in a moment it held as in a remote memory the promise of spring, of distant summers. Their shining days ran on youth’s feet over the land.

  About nine o’clock he got up to go out, for he had communicated his own silence to his mother and suddenly became afraid that she would speak.

  There was a strong wind blowing. The sky was dark in colour but clear of cloud, and he could see well enough to know that the moon had risen beyond the hill which he began slowly to climb. His feet took him to the hollow where Janet and himself had met so often.

  For a moment his heart rose into his throat, but when he had stumbled down he saw that the bent back was no more than a low salley bush. That weakened him, and for a while he lay down on the damp grass.

  But the illusion brought Janet very near to him, so near that he realised how she inhabited his mind. His bitterness was suffused by a sensation of tears, of an extreme weariness, of irrevocable loss.

  Moving up out of the hollow, he came presently on to a shoulder and saw the moon. Its circle was flawless. It looked over the hill ridge down upon the Glen. The intensity of its stare whitened its golden face. Its withholding serenity was ominous. Its calm sinister. Suddenly Tom was struck by a primeval ghastliness of fear. In the moon’s light was a dread more terrible than any darkness knew.

  He turned away and began hurrying down. Without hesitation he went straight along the base of the hillside until he stood above Janet’s home. He saw the light in her kitchen window. From the house to the left of it rose the muffled singing of a psalm. It was the hour for Sunday night family worship, and everyone was within doors.

  To go down there was worse than futile: it was betrayal of himself; it was a maddening advance against his own loathing. Not though his life depended on it would he have touched Janet with a finger-tip. There had been times when he had wished with a sick hatred that he could let her see how much he loathed her, as a desperate man might desire the only medicine that would cool him.

  But now he knew that nothing could keep him back. After the first few steps he hardly thought, indeed, of what he was doing. It was nothing of any importance, it meant nothing. By the time he reached the henhouse wall, he was like a cool stranger to himself, the invisible one who can’t be seen.

  He had no sooner reached the wall than he heard high voices beyond the yellow blind. At once he stepped across to the window and in a moment his skin ran cold.

  By their voices, he had plainly come on the scene as it was reaching a culminating point.

  ‘But I will make you tell me. Do you hear me?’ The voice was shrill, but not out of control. It was charged with the horrible menace of one who, however mad, would fulfil her words, and fulfil them now. ‘Who is he? Will you tell me?’

  ‘No,’ answered Janet in shrill defiance.

  ‘You won’t tell me, won’t you?’ There was a clatter of fireirons. ‘You won’t tell me!’ screamed the voice. ‘You hussy, you impudent, brazen, dirty hussy. I’ll make you tell me! I’ll smash in your pretty face for you, you whore. I’ll teach you how to go with men, you low bitch!’

  ‘Mother!’ yelled Janet. ‘Mother!’

  Tom sprang to the back door. It was on the latch. He stumbled over a bucket of water against the wall in the small dark porch, and as he pitched against the door to the
kitchen it burst open before him to the sound of a scream from Janet, the upsetting of the kitchen table, and a spilling roar from a drawer of cutlery.

  The woman was standing with hair wisps over her brows, her eyes, blazing with an insane light, now concentrated on Tom with such speechless, motionless intensity that he could hardly draw his own eyes away from them. The table, tilted over on its side, lay across Janet’s thighs. In its shadow he saw Janet’s pale face, streaked with blood. Her chest and shoulders squirmed slowly, her head tilted, giving a low moan.

  ‘My God, what have you done?’ he breathed.

  In an instant he forgot her, going towards Janet. He was stooping to lift the table back, when he heard her yell and turned. He knew he was too late; in the fraction of an instant he realised, with a sense of prolonged dismay, that he was too late. Almost indeed it seemed to him that he waited for the blow. Possibly he could not have moved more swiftly. But that was not how it seemed. And when the heavy fireiron struck him, he still had the feeling of standing and looking at her and waiting.

  Later his bruised forearm showed that it had taken part of the blow, and his head must have dodged to one side, for the heavy end, shaped like a huge soldering bolt, of the long iron poker struck him across the side of his face from above the right ear down to the jaw.

  He was conscious of a crushing of his face rather than of pain. His physical strength ebbed and his sight dimmed. He made a supreme effort to keep to his feet, but the darkening thickened. Through it he heard her savage cry, small as if shouted from a great distance, and saw her draw back to swing the iron once more. The squat brown-painted tin lamp, with its bright reflector behind the glass funnel, sat on the mantelshelf at the level of her ear, glowing from a trimmed wick fully turned up. The end of the poker caught the metal bowl of the lamp and swept it from the mantelshelf. As his consciousness faded out he saw the moving light flare up violently in the funnel behind her head.